“Agent Ross, Alexandra.” Barnard nods his head in our direction. “How did your mission go?”
“Very successfully,” Ross says. “We found the bomb and the expert was able to deactivate it before it could go off. We got a pretty good look at the perp, too. Shouldn’t be too hard to track him down.”
I pretend to be interested in the rotating pictures from the security feeds inside Charlie’s station: a grainy image of the Center’s front steps, a group of Youngers reciting lessons in a classroom, Yuki mopping an empty hallway. The common room looks busy and I make a mental note to avoid it.
“Good.” Barnard sounds no more impressed by Ross’s answer than if he’d said we’d prevented a fender bender. Instead, he asks Ross when he’ll be receiving a copy of his last report. Ross isn’t known for stellar paperwork. I touch the spot on my forehead where my headache still throbs. Dr. Barnard turns abruptly in my direction.
“How are you feeling, Alexandra?”
Ross stops talking. Barnard peers at me over his wire-rimmed glasses. The lobby suddenly seems very crowded. Three pairs of eyes fix on me: Charlie’s gaze mildly curious, Barnard’s clinical, Ross’s anxious. A warm flush creeps along the side of my neck. Who do I trust? Barnard the efficient scientist? Or Ross and the possibility of a longer life? My heart rate jumps, no doubt sending heightened levels of chronotin gushing through my veins. I take a breath.
“I’m fine,” I say.
Ross rewards me with a massive grin. The pain in my head fades to a dull pulse.
Dr. Barnard frowns. “No worse headaches than usual? Any nausea?”
I scuff the worn tiles under my feet.
“No,” I lie.
“It was a rough day,” Ross says. “We ended up cutting it a little close. Things were pretty tense in there for a while.”
“I see.” Barnard sounds thoughtful, perhaps wondering why the gruesome murder I’d rewound a few months ago hadn’t fazed me when a plastic box had. I keep my attention glued to the floor. One of Ross’s shoelaces has come untied. Barnard’s leather oxfords gleam.
“If you need to rest,” Barnard says, “you can spend the afternoon in your room.”
“That’s OK,” I mutter. If my days are numbered, the last place I want to spend them is shut up alone in my room. “I signed up to work with KJ in the garden.”
“If that’s what you prefer.” He turns to Ross. “We have a free office, why don’t you write up your report here.”
“I won’t be able to do that.” Ross backs away. “I’m supposed to meet Chief Graham for a press conference.”
“Make sure you get us a copy of both reports when they’re complete,” Barnard calls after him.
Ross says something vague. Behind Barnard’s back, he winks at me. Charlie buzzes the door open and Ross strolls outside. Sunshine picks up lighter threads in his hair, making them glint like strands of gold. At the threshold, he turns and waves to me. I watch him leave, holding our secret inside my chest, a tendril of hope to protect me from the shadows that descend as the front door’s locks click back into place.
04
THE CENTER’S COURTYARD ISN’T A GREAT PLACE FOR a garden. Shade covers most of it, so there’s only a small area that gets enough sun to grow anything besides rhododendrons. All of us have to take shifts working in it—part of the do-gooder Society for Spinner Rights’s theory that we’ll be happier spending time outside and eating locally sourced organic food. A theory that will be hard to prove since we’ve never harvested more than two meals’ worth of greens in a season.
Cool air touches my face as I step outside, bringing with it the scent of freshly turned earth. KJ is pulling up some weeds that invaded the space between the beds. The steady work must have warmed him, because he’s ditched his sweatshirt, leaving his long brown arms bare. I watch him for a minute. Everything about him—the focused concentration, muscled shoulders, dark brows, and the proud arc of his nose—already seems tinged with the nostalgia of loss.
“Hey,” I call.
KJ settles on his heels, smiling. “You’re back early.”
KJ’s full name is Kaleel Jabar, which means his birth parents must have been of Arab descent. One of the Society’s first initiatives back in the 1960s was a campaign to replace randomly generated first names for spinners with ethnically appropriate first and last names. Like all the Society’s efforts, this one is kind of a joke, since none of us are raised with any kind of cultural identity. KJ dropped Kaleel when he was still a Younger after another kid started calling him Kaleel the Heel. KJ is over six feet tall now, out of reach of most teasing, but his chosen nickname stuck.
I cross toward him. KJ shoves his overlong bangs away from his eyes with his wrist, the only part of his hands that isn’t muddy.
“How’d it go?” he asks.
I grimace. “Not great.”
“What? No fun huddle with Ross to speculate on the latest Sikes theory?”
“No.”
The abruptness of my answer wipes the cheer from his face.
“What happened?” he asks. I move closer and my expression must give something away because he adds, “Are you OK?”
“It’s just …” that I’m dying.
I can’t do it. And I certainly can’t tell him about Ross’s offer of a new, unlicensed drug. KJ is a worrier, and I don’t think I can handle his fears on top of my own. I plunk myself down on a patch of grass near the beds. At this point in the afternoon, the sun has abandoned all but a small corner of the courtyard. In the spot where I sit, the air carries a definite chill.
“I’m just tired,” I say. “We ended up getting called in on a bomb scare at City Hall. There were, like, thirty cops there, and all of them were freaking out.”
“A bomb? You’re kidding. How come you always get the glory jobs?”
Coming from anyone else, the words would have made me defensive. KJ is the only spinner in the Center who doesn’t give me grief about how much I like time work. Not that he particularly enjoys the job. KJ’s agent is in the traffic division so mostly he unwinds car accidents. He says the missions are usually dull and occasionally gruesome, and he sees no reason to spend more energy on them than he has to.
I pluck half-heartedly at a patch of dandelions making inroads on some nearby lettuce. “What’d you do today?”
“Barnard’s computer froze up, so I spent all morning cleaning off a virus. It was actually really cool.”
A dreamy expression creeps over KJ’s face. Despite my own worries, I can’t help smiling. KJ is fascinated by computers, the same way I’m drawn to solving crimes. He sees viruses as puzzles—untangle the code and the whole thing comes apart. I only follow about half of his explanations, but I love that he’s passionate about something. Most of the kids here waste all their time on video games and TV.
I throw my handful of dandelions at him.
“You’re such a dork.”
KJ laughs and picks up a rake.
“Hey, come on, dork is the new cool.”
I flop onto my back and stare upwards. The walls surrounding the courtyard hide most of the sky, leaving only a rectangle of blue overhead. The more I stare up at it, the more the walls seem to be leaning, as if they’re closing in around me.
“If you weren’t a spinner,” I ask, “what would you want to be?”
“Lots of things.” KJ rakes the scattered weeds into a pile. “Computer programmer, obviously. Or maybe a scientist.”
“You could run the experiments they do on the sick spinners at the Central Office. Find out why no one ever comes back from there.”
“Not medical science. I’d want to be a marine biologist. I’ve always wanted to see the ocean.” He leans against the rake. “I would freeze time and get really close to great white sharks. Or see what it looks like underwater when a wave crashes into a reef.”
“I said imagine if you weren’t a spinner.”
“I’d rather stay a spinner and be able to do whatever I wanted.”
Dampness from the ground seeps through my CIC shirt. I shiver.
“If you were still a spinner, Norms would think you were too much of a freak to let you join their expedition. Plus, you’d die before you learned enough to be useful.”
“Aren’t you Miss Cheerful today.” KJ bends to scoop up the pile of weeds. “What would you want to be?”
A cloud drifts over the edge of the Center’s walls. I study it, trying to force the bit of fluff into some kind of shape, but all I can see is a blob. I turn KJ’s question around in my mind to the one I really want to ask: what would you do with your life if you knew you had only a few months left to live? An ache fills me, the longing as unshaped as the blobby cloud.
“I’d want to be someone important,” I say. “Someone who makes a difference.”
“That’s funny.” KJ carries the weeds over to the composter. “Shannon and I were just talking about that last night. About how we all need to feel useful. She says that’s why she likes working with the Youngers.”
Something about the way he says her name, just a shade too casually, catches my attention. I lift my head.
“Shannon?”
“Yeah.” KJ is still messing with the compost so I can’t see his face. “You know she’s not as much of an airhead as you always claim.”
I wriggle my shoulders. The grass itches my back, each blade an individual irritant. Shannon is my roommate. If she weren’t a spinner, she’d be a cheerleader, all pep and bounce, with a deep desire to indulge in volunteer work. I sit up.
“You and Shannon, huh?” I’m trying really hard to make my voice sound light. “Anything I should know about?”
“I don’t know.” KJ finally turns around. “Would it bother you if I went out with someone?”
The walls of the courtyard shrink a bit closer. I force myself to picture it: KJ and Shannon, together. My best friend distracted by someone else in what might be the last few months of my life. The acid remnants of nausea rise up to scrape the back of my throat. When I swallow, my mouth tastes bitter.
“Why would it bother me?” I stand and pick up KJ’s abandoned rake, scraping it across a mound of dirt. “It’s not like I’m your girlfriend or anything.”
KJ’s mouth pinches shut and the quiet from his unsaid words is loud enough to muffle the rasp of my unproductive raking. I focus my attention on my task, bending the thin tines under the strength of my stroke. KJ and I arrived at the Center the same summer. At ten, I was the youngest kid there and so shy I barely made eye contact with anyone. He was twelve, super scrawny, and suffering from a bad case of acne. The teacher at the time, Mr. Thomas, paired us up for a class project, and we started sitting together at meals. By fall we were inseparable. Two years later, things changed. I overheard another girl sighing about how cute he was, and after that I couldn’t stop noticing the adorable way his hair curled over his ears. Then KJ started getting tongue-tied in the middle of the simplest conversations, and it no longer seemed casual if our shoulders touched. When we finally kissed I felt like I’d entered a three-dimensional world after living in two dimensions all my life. The Center looked brighter. Food tasted sweeter. Every song on the radio was about us. We both rearranged our schedules so we could spend every possible minute together.
And then … I don’t know. It got weird. People teased us. The staff started assigning us to separate jobs to “keep a healthy perspective.” KJ saw me laughing with Simon and got mad. We argued. I was only twelve and it all just seemed like too much. So I told him I wanted to break up. The six months that followed were the worst of my life. I slunk around the Center trying to avoid him, yet unable to talk to anyone else without thinking how dull they were in comparison. Shannon did her best to make me feel better, but she had recently broken up with Aidan, and listening to her inane theories about healing chakras was worse than being alone. The only way I could sleep was to practice freezing during the day for so long that I’d be exhausted by the time it was lights out. It took ages before KJ and I worked through all that awkwardness and regained our friendship, so now I’m always very careful not to do anything that might screw things up again. Acting like I’m jealous is definitely in the screw-up category.
“I’m sorry,” I say to KJ, “that sounded bitchy. You should do whatever makes you happy.”
“Yeah.” KJ wipes some of the dirt off his hands. “Well, there is something nice about being around someone who thinks you’re special.”
I pull harder on the rake. He’s clearly annoyed, so I must not have done a convincing job of acting supportive. Should I offer to say something to Shannon? A splinter flakes off the wooden handle, shooting beneath my skin with a sharp stab. I yelp. KJ is beside me in seconds. He takes my hand and opens it inside his own. The jagged tip of the splinter sticks out from my skin and KJ rubs at it, trying to ease it out with his thumb.
I breathe in the smell of him—dirt and sweat and crushed dandelions—and the formless ache inside me stretches even wider. All the secrets I’m keeping from him rush so close to the tip of my tongue I have to bite it to stop myself from screaming them. I know if I tell him about getting sick, he won’t hook up with Shannon, and I also know that keeping him away from her is a selfish reason for fessing up. A sigh works its way from deep in my gut, a long rasp of air that only expands the ache inside me. KJ looks up.
“Are you really OK? You seem, I don’t know, distracted.”
“I’m fine,” I say, automatically. KJ frowns.
“I just have a lot to think about.” I search my brain for an excuse that doesn’t involve new girlfriends or death or untested drugs. “Ross thinks the City Hall bomber might know something about Sikes. If he’s right, we might be able to uncover Sikes’s identity.”
KJ pokes my palm, trying to grasp the end of the splinter.
“Aren’t you worried that if you and Ross get close to Sikes, he’ll come after you like he did to Sal?”
“Ross is careful. Whenever he makes inquiries he always pretends they’re about some other case. Besides, I live locked up in the Sick. What safer place could there be?”
KJ makes an irritated sound in the back of his throat. “I think you’re getting kind of obsessed with this Sikes thing.”
“I told you, I want to make a difference. This is how.”
“I get that, but what about, I don’t know, hanging out with your friends?”
He looks at me, his eyes dark and unreadable. I shift my feet.
“We do hang out,” I say.
“We could hang out more. It’s not like we have endless time.”
His hand tightens around mine. When we were an item, all those years ago, KJ used to hold my hand like this, as if it was the most precious gift in the world. I rub my temple, trying to erase the memory. Getting sentimental about the past is just going to make things awkward between us, which is not something I can afford. There is no way I’ll survive the stress of a drug trial without KJ’s friendship to lean on.
“You’re right,” I tell him, making a huge effort to sound casual, “we don’t have a lot of time, which means we really need to focus on the things we want to accomplish.”
KJ makes another unsuccessful swipe at my splinter. He looks like he wants to keep arguing, so I slip my hand free. He’ll never get the splinter out, anyway. He’s too afraid to hurt me to really dig in and yank.
“I’m going to go find Yolly,” I say. “See if she has some tweezers.”
“Are you coming back?”
“I’m really tired. Dr. Barnard said I could go up to my room. I might do that.”
I walk back into the Center with KJ’s disappointment burning a hole between my shoulder blades. Ten minutes ago, the idea of being alone sounded awful, right now it feels like a reprieve. At least then I won’t have to lie.
05
YOLLY POUNCES ON ME BEFORE I’VE TAKEN THREE steps down the hallway.
“There you are!” she cries. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere. The press confere
nce about the bombing is about to start. Barnard gave permission for us all to watch it together on TV!”
My stomach sinks all the way to my toes. Sitting in a room with the other spinners, pretending nothing is wrong, sounds about as appealing as spending a month scouring toilets.
“That’s OK,” I say. “I already know what happened.”
“Don’t be silly. It will be fun to see Mr. Ross on TV.”
We’re supposed to call Yolly Ms. Yolanda, but only Dr. Barnard uses her full name. She’s a large, comfortable-looking woman with short black hair curled into an immobile cap around her face. She constantly reminds us how lucky we are to be living in a Center run by the famous Dr. Barnard. You’re getting the best care in the world here, she says. Jack calls her Jolly Yolly behind her back because she always talks in an aren’t-we-having-fun voice.
I try a new angle.
“I’m such a mess.” I wiggle my grass-stained fingers in her direction. “I need to wash up.”
“Be quick, then, so you don’t miss any of it.” Yolly beams at me. “It’s going to be on in less than ten minutes!”
I try to dig up another reason to refuse her invitation. Nothing comes to me. Besides, I am a little curious to hear what Chief Graham will say about the tip-off call, so I nod and trudge off to the nearest bathroom.
The common room is much less cozy than the name implies. It’s a big, shabby space on the ground floor with blinds covering the windows so outsiders can’t see in. Fluorescent lights hum over linoleum floors and an assortment of mismatched furniture. A bookcase stretches across one wall, mostly well-thumbed paperbacks—romance and thrillers are popular—mingling with pristine good-for-you classics, courtesy of ever-hopeful Yolly. A shelf on the opposite wall holds a haphazard stack of puzzles, board games, and some neglected art supplies. Besides the TV, there’s also a table holding a CD player and three computers with lots of games but no internet access. Jack claims they don’t want us in contact with people outside the Center. Yolly says it’s not in the budget.
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